Abstract
PurposeFreight vehicle parking facilities at large urban freight traffic generators, such as urban retail malls, are often characterized by a high volume of vehicle arrivals and a poor parking supply infrastructure. Recurrent congestion of freight parking facilities generates environmental (e.g. pollution), economic (e.g. delays in deliveries) and social (e.g. traffic) negative externalities. Solutions aimed at either improving or better managing the existing parking infrastructure rely heavily on data and data-driven models to predict their impact and guide their implementation. In the current work, we provide a quantitative study of the parking supply and freight vehicle drivers’ parking behaviour at urban retail malls.MethodsWe use as case studies two typical urban retail malls located in Singapore, and collect detailed data on freight vehicles delivering or picking up goods at these malls. Insights from this data collection effort are relayed as data stories. We first describe the parking facility at a mall as a queueing system, where freight vehicles are the agents and their decisions are the parking location choice and the parking duration.ResultsUsing the data collected, we analyse (i) the arrival rates of vehicles at the observed malls, (ii) the empirical distribution of parking durations at the loading bays, (iii) the factors that influence the parking duration, (iv) the empirical distribution of waiting times spent by freight vehicle queueing to access the loading bay, and (v) the driver parking location choices and how this choice is influenced by system congestion.ConclusionsThis characterisation of freight driver behaviour and parking facility system performance enables one to understand current challenges, and begin to explore the feasibility of freight parking and loading bay management solutions.
Highlights
1.1 BackgroundLarge buildings in urban areas such as retail malls, hotels, hospitals and office buildings, are of interest to urban and transportation planners because they contribute a large share of the freight vehicles traffic
In the specific case of a single freight vehicle often returning to the Loading Bay (LB) of a mall, having a weakly stationary sequence of parking durations means that its recorded PDs at the observed mall vary randomly around the mean with a constant standard deviation, and the mean PD does not change over time
Using data collected at two large urban retail malls in Singapore, we perform an empirical analysis of the key variables that can be used to characterise the freight vehicle parking system of these establishment, quantify the congestion levels of the parking facilities and assess its traffic impact
Summary
We use as case studies two typical urban retail malls located in Singapore, and collect detailed data on freight vehicles delivering or picking up goods at these malls. Insights from this data collection effort are relayed as data stories. We first describe the parking facility at a mall as a queueing system, where freight vehicles are the agents and their decisions are the parking location choice and the parking duration
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